Bartonville embraces history, eyes its future

EDITOR’S
NOTE:Students
from the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism wrote about
people and places around Denton County as part of their spring coursework.

BARTONVILLE — A John Deere tractor
towers over a muddy four-wheeler. The two stand in front of an empty horse
stable that gets its beige color partly from paint and partly from wear. Across
a gravel path, a 1970s camper shell sits next to a traditional red barn. A red
hay baler and a landscaping trailer take up the rest of the driveway.

“Usually, I’d be in my denim overalls,
looking like a farmer,” said Ronnie Brown, straightening his shirt.

Brown embodies living history in Bartonville,
and he is one of the last of his kind. The town boasts a rich farming and horse
ranching heritage tracing back to the 1860s.

“My grandmother’s family came here from
Missouri by covered wagon, with two big oxen tied to it,” he said. “They heard
that Texas had a lot of free land, and so that’s why most of these people are
here now — the old group, they came here lookin’ for free land.”

At first glance, there still appears to
be plenty of land.

Entering the town from the north,
visitors are welcomed by vast expanses of white picket fencing that corrals the
green, rolling acres of horse ranches along FM407.

The pastoral landscape stops, however,
when a master-planned housing subdivision called Lantana comes into view just
outside the town limits.

Denton County is listed among the top
three of North Texas’ fastest growing counties.

There are, however, still a few
remaining artifacts from old Bartonville, including the Bartonville Food Store,
which opened in the 1930s and is now owned by James R. Price, whose family
bought it in 1959. Inside, old soda bottles line a dusty shelf. The chipped
white paint on the shelf resembles a picket fence that has weathered many
storms.

“When I was growing up, everything was
centered around three places: the Shiloh Baptist Church, the Double Oak School
House and the Bartonville Food Store,” Brown said. “My dad bought the west side
of the cotton gin, when it was right across the street from Price’s store.”

Brown and Price remember when peanuts
grew in the rich, sandy soil of Bartonville. Brown has fond memories from his
childhood of shaking the dirt out of freshly thrashed peanuts and eating them
when they were so green that they gave him a bellyache.

“But the government controlled all the
commodities back then,” he said. “They’d come out and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got 10
acres, or 3 acres,’ and they’d cut it down to where you couldn’t make a living
at it anymore.”

Price said that when residents couldn’t
grow peanuts anymore they quit farming.

“Change and growth are inevitable,” he
said. “You either grow or you decline.”

The food store is one of the only places
holding fast in the midst of the town’s development storm. In 2003, Phase I of
Bartonville Town Center was completed, and it occupies 15 of the town’s 3,904
acres. And although Lantana isn’t incorporated into Bartonville, its presence
looms over the remaining acreage.

The owner of the town center, Denmiss
LLC, which claims to be “part of an eight-generation family enterprise with 140
years of experience in property development,” is planning to build Phase II,
which is still in the “visionary stages,” according to its website.

The town center’s property manager,
Linda Terrill, said that Phase II construction will begin when Phase I fills
up, and that the company hopes to bring in a major retailer or grocery store,
and possibly both.

“The sooner, the better,” she said.

Price said that until a 7-Eleven opened
recently at the town center, his store and the Exxon station down the road were
the only places in town to get groceries and convenience items. “[The
developers] told me that my store and the supermarket were like apples and
oranges,” he said.

Bartonville, however, isn’t known for
being easily pushed aside.

In the 1960s, a hostile annexation
attempt by the city of Irving rallied Bartonville residents to incorporate in
order to protect their land.

“I was a council member, and we
reorganized the township so that they wouldn’t come up and get us,” Brown said.
“Somebody had to do it. We was just sittin’ here for the wolves to come
pickin’.”

Price said Bartonville is now a “bedroom
community” whose residents don’t have a huge stake in the history of their
town. But he is rolling with the punches of modernization.

His Bartonville Bull Sharks — a group of
locals who meet in the mornings to drink coffee and shoot the breeze at two
picnic tables in the food store — have morphed over the years. The oldest “old
timer” in the group has only lived in the area for about 20 years. The
conversations have shifted from hay, grain and cattle prices to development
costs and smartphones, Price said.

It doesn’t seem to bother him much —
yet.

Construction workers are good for
business, Price said, and he’s always looking for ways to attract Lantana
residents. In a world where the flood of development rushes in, he has to stay
afloat.

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